In this article we are going to take a look at options on how to deploy a standard PHP application to Azure App Service. This article is split into two parts – classical App Service running Windows and the new Docker-based App Service on Linux which recently got some really nice improvements towards PHP support.

When I was writing a web application with ASP.NET Core with Azure AD and Microsoft Graph, I ran into a very interesting issue – the identity cookies would get really large (8 kB or more in chunked authentication cookies) and therefore all the requests to the site would contain this much data in headers. This was bearable because it just “worked” but then I tried accessing the site from Safari on a MacBook or an iPhone and the server would return errors when trying to rebuild the user’s identity.

Whenever you are collecting a date with Application Insights, it might be handy to have the ability to filter the telemetry based on currently signed in user. The documentation is quite confusing about it, so I decided to write an article and clear it up.

While working on a project, I stumbled upon an interesting issue – how to force the user to reauthenticate in an application – for example when accessing some sensitive information? While it may seem quite straightforward from the documentation of Azure AD, it is not that simple, and if you are using prompt=login to reauthenticate the user, I quite suggest you read on.

When building a Line Of Business (LOB) application, you are usually better off with implementing the customer’s current Identity Provider (IdP) which could be ADFS, Azure AD or some others. The benefits are clear – users use a single account for all the services, authenticate through a central point, can be more protected by conditional access policies and as a great benefit, you can leverage the existing data through Microsoft Graph for example. So while it is obvious why to use Single Sign On in your application, a little bit less discussed topic is about Single Sign Out (SLO).

Recently I have been working on a project in ASP.NET Core and DotVVM accompanied by a WebJob using Azure WebJob SDK. The idea behind publishing was that whenever I push code to the repository (VSTS in my case), App Service would pull the code, build it and deploy it automatically (this is achieved by setting up Continuous Deployment). This method works just great for ASP.NET Core application, however when accompanied by a WebJob, things weren’t as smooth as I was expecting them to be.

If you have been watching Connect(); or if you read the Azure blog, you should be aware by now, that Azure has recently introduced a pretty cool service called App Service on Linux. It is probably also not going to be a surprise to you if I tell you that it is being powered by Docker. And that is not the only great thing about it – you can also bring your own Docker image into App Service on Linux!